Assembling lines: queue management and the production of market economy in post-socialist services

Abstract

ABSTRACT‘Time priority’ by queuing is the epitome of market fairness in stock exchanges, while queuing also symbolizes the shortage economy of state-socialism. How are mundane queues made to constitute markets in settings where they performed anti-markets? The paper looks at this problem through ethnomethodology, which sees queuing as the prime example of how social-moral order is produced by participants of situations. Queues appear out of thin air, and can be analyzed as a ‘designed enterprise’ of small utterances and bodily gestures, accomplishing ordinariness. The paper rethinks how this theoretical approach can gauge the properties of ‘invisible lines’ in automated queues, and broadens its scope by framing queuers as objects of organizational control, and queues as not purely social but socio-technical accomplishments. Based on the observation of a digital waiting system in Hungarian banking, the paper shows how automated queue management changes the temporality and accountability between individuals and organizations, and reorders post-socialist banking as distinctly market-based service. Personal-physical lines are replaced with material ‘governance pairs’, which not only assess but rather format customers’ financial needs. Market economy, as produced in mundane automation ties together an obscure order for service customers with total accountability for bank employees’ performance.